Kate’s Gift Ideas for the Knitters in Your Life

It’s that time of year again! Â Do you have a crafter in your life you need to buy a gift for?

Yarn and needles are obvious – but challenging – gifts to choose. Are you confident about your crafter’s favorite types and colors of yarn? Do you know what needles your crafter likes using best? For some of us it’s prettyobvious what to buy, but not for everyone. Â A gift certificate for a yarn shop is always appreciated, too, of course – support your local yarn shops!

But have you considered going a different way? One thing that crafters always struggle with is storage and organization.

Me, I’d love more plastic storage tubs for my yarn. Keep your yarn safe from moths, dust, pet hair and water. Â RubbermaidÂ is a popular brand, available at most hardware and department stores, andÂ Ikea makes great ones, too.

All sizes for all sizes of stash.

How about a bookcase for your crafter’s book and pattern collection? This can be a large budget gift: buying furniture – or a no-budget-at-all gift: clear a bookshelf of your own books to make a crafting-shelf. Take this one step further a create a crafting corner in the knitter’s home – find a comfy chair, a coffee table, a shelf for books and baskets or boxes to hold supplies and move them into a quiet space that can be dedicated to your knitter.

Some of my favorite knitting tools are office supplies:

Magazine storage files.

Useful for pattern leaflets and booklets, too.

Sheet protectors and sticky notes for storing patterns-in-progress.

Vitally important. A pen, too!

Is your crafter a budding designer? Graph paper and colored pencils are tons of fun.

Start designing!

And again, this can be done with very little budget: Google “printable graph paper” and print some sheets, and find coloured pencils at a toy shop, office supply store, or discount store.

Is your budget big? Consider a camera. Helpful if your crafter has a blog, but even just for uploading proud pictures of Finished Objects to Ravelry. Or if the budget is small, and you’re in possession of a good eye and steady hands, adorable small children, or a winning smile, make a coupon promising to help your crafter out with the some photoshoots. Crafters are always looking for help with photography – we need people to wear the socks or mitts so we can photograph them, or people to hold the camera while we model our own sweaters. And if you’re very clever at the computer, how about promising to help out with blogging, or photo editing?

We’ll have more ideas for gifts the next two Mondays, and as always, follow the Yarnharlot’s blog for gift ideas. She does a series every December with excellent suggestions. Read through last year’s to get a head start.

7 thoughts on “Kate’s Gift Ideas for the Knitters in Your Life”

For my last birthday I told my mom that I wanted plastic storage bins. She thought it strange but relented and ordered some nice ones from Amazon. I think in her heart she believes that she is enabling my yarn addiction with the bins, but then she is the one who gifted me a loom so that I could “use up” my stash. Clearly, my own mother does not understand me.

Where can I find more installments of “Taking Better Photographs”? I am needing to do that, and wanted to hear more about your experience. I have searched knitty several different ways — but obviously not the right way!

I recently noticed that Post-Its make a Super Sticky Post-It which is amazing for “underlining” (or “overlining”) the row you’re on in a pattern or chart. The Super stickiness means they don’t fall off, even after countless reapplications during the course of a project.

Iris, I think that is also called “highlighter tape.” My LYS has some and I love using it–so handy for making sure you don’t lose your place on a chart and easily removable so you can use the pattern multiple times (unlike highlighting it with a highlighter).